Spooner by Pete Dexter

Warren Spooner was born after a prolonged delivery in a makeshift delivery room in a doctor's office in Milledgeville, Georgia, on the first Saturday of December, 1956. His father died shortly afterward, long before Spooner had even a memory of his face, and was replaced eventually by a once-brilliant young naval officer, Calmer Ottosson, recently court-martialed out of service. This is the story of the lifelong tie between the two men, poles apart, of Spooner's troubled childhood, troubled adolescence, violent and troubled adulthood and Calmer Ottosson's inexhaustible patience, undertaking a life-long struggle to salvage his step-son, a man he will never understand.

Novelist, journalist, and poet Pete Dexter was born in Pontiac, Michigan, in 1943. As a student at the University of South Dakota, where he attended on and off for ten years, he wrote poetry and won a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. After graduating in 1970, he found work as a newspaper reporter. While working as a columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News, Dexter was nearly beaten to death by readers who disapproved of a piece he wrote about a drug-related murder. That experience helped propel him into fiction writing, and in 1984, he published God's Pocket. Dexter won a National Book Award in 1988 for his novel Paris Trout, a book that exemplifies his characteristic blending of humor and violence. As a journalist, his work has also appeared in such periodicals as Esquire and Playboy.

The New York Times

He simply couldn’t stem the flood of story that poured forth as he chronicled the misadventures of Warren Spooner from his birth in Milledgeville, Ga., in 1956 (where Dexter, born 13 years earlier, also grew up), to his failed early attempts at employment and marriage in Florida (another echo fro...

Entertainment Weekly

Pete Dexter, the gorgeous writer of hard beauties like Paris Trout, will make you laugh yourself into a fit one page and hold back tears the next, even though he sometimes lets his story careen off the rails (particularly in later scenes of Spooner's adult life).

Christian Science Monitor

USA Today

Pete Dexter, a legendary newspaper columnist turned novelist, has written a delightfully quirky semi-autobiographical novel about a talented misfit named Warren Spooner with an ambivalent view of other reporters:"Most of them were pretty good reporters at least better reporters than he was and ...

MostlyFiction Book Reviews

“The dog would not come, or sit, or answer to his name, and sometimes Calmer sat holding it in the utility room– where they kept it at night — looking it over in the same peculiar way he sometimes looked at Spooner, when he thought Spooner wasn’t watching.”.

Military.com

"Spooner's mother rolls out of bed on her own and gains her feet, and in those first vertical moments with one of her hands clutching a visitor's chair for balance and the other covering her mouth against the possibility of unpleasant morning breath, she issues Spooner, feet first and the color o...

Metro

Star News Online

Both wrote a closely researched, graphic novel called Deadwood, dealing with the real-life Wild Bill Hickock and Charlie Utter.(Dexters Deadwood came out in 1986, decades ahead of the HBO series, which did not credit him, although its plot was remarkably close to the novels.)De...

The Anniston Star

Keeping within the confines of its author’s chosen genre, Spooner encapsulates an entire lifetime and spans the continent as it measures, at length, the elusive connection between Warren Spooner and his stepfather, Calmer Ottosson.

Billings Gazette

MISSOULA —A Thompson Falls man who killed a man and his fiancee in a drunk driving crash that also injured two children has been sentenced to …
BUTTE - In an effort to relieve tension, Bureau and Land Management officials met with a neighboring landowner to ...

Creative Loafing

So when Warren Spooner, the protagonist of Pete Dexter’s new book, Spooner, is born in Milledgeville in 1956, just a year after O’Connor published A Good Man Is Hard to Find, the significance is hard to ignore.